IBM Unveils New Development Offerings Based on Jazz

At last week's INNOVATE 2011 conference, IBM announced new application development collaboration software built on its Jazz open source development platform. New features are designed to enable developers to interact quickly, share data from any source in the development process and connect teams and development communities.

"A critical challenge facing businesses is how to innovate through fostering collaboration among teams and a complex array of partners and suppliers," says Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, general manager of IBM Rational. "A collaborative software development platform integrating the entire end-to-end software and systems lifecycle is needed for true innovation."

The new solutions include Collaborative Design Management, delivered through new offerings of IBM's Rational Rhapsody Design Manager and Rational Software Architect Design Manager, enabling designs to move out of the isolation on an architect's or developer's desktop. They can now be part of an open ecosystem using a simple, web-based user interface that enables extended team members and stakeholders to build earlier consensus, prevent costly project misdirection, and improve the software and systems delivery.

Also new is the new Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management, which brings together IBM Rational Requirements Composer, IBM Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational Quality Manager in a unified development platform to encourage cross-functional collaboration, helping teams improve their time-to-delivery, quality, product value and predictability.

IBM announced a new deployment planning and automation solution as well that is intended to help clients reduce reworking projects through standardized processes and allows automation for deploying software. Existing development assets can be reused, regardless of whether they reside on the cloud or on-site servers.

In addition, to help improve the identification and remediation of potential problems and issues, IBM has developed an Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration community (OSLC)-based integration between the IT operations ticketing system, Tivoli Service Request Manager, and the development team solution, Rational Team Concert. This enables IT operations staff to enter defect and enhancement requests directly into the software development tracking system.